Chesapeake by James A. Michener
“Silverfist,” the sailors of Patamoke called him, but they did nothing to challenge him to use his heavy left arm. Matthew was forty-five when he lost his ship, a tall, ragged, red-bearded waterman with deep-set eyes hidden by shaggy red eyebrows. He had sailed the Chesapeake since birth; indeed, he had gone alone upon it at the age of four, and he intended to continue. What he needed now was a ship.
When he stopped at the office of George Paxmore he found the Quaker builder eager to replace the Whisper. Indeed, the young man was so distressed by the burning of his family’s masterpiece that he seemed willing to proceed without a specific commission. But not quite. After he brought his enthusiasm under control he asked, “Has thee money to pay for it?” And he was relieved when Turlock said, “Enough.”
Paxmore did not want to hear any specifications from the captain; his only desire was to build a ship which would excel, but as he grudgingly divulged his plans he did occasionally stop to ask, “Does thee understand what I’m after?”
Surprisingly, Turlock was content to let him have his way, for he had learned from his father that the Whisper’s applauded merit lay one fourth in what Turlock did with her, and three fourths in what Levin Paxmore had built into her. “All I want,” he told young Paxmore, “is the best your family ever built.”
“That’s what thee’ll get, but the cost will not be slight,” and he produced a paper on which he had figured to the last trunnel. “It totals $2,863.47.”
“What dimensions?” Turlock asked.
“Eighty-two feet nine inches length, twenty-three feet six inches breadth. Draws ten-six in the bow, fourteen-eight in the stern.”
“Good. I do not want it bow-heavy.”
“Nor I,” said Paxmore. Then he waited for a confirmation, but instead of speaking, Matt Turlock drew from his waist a canvas bag laden with silver corns and began to count, pushing them into piles with his silver-tipped left hand. When the sum amounted to a thousand dollars American, he said, “Build it. I have the balance.” And he disappeared.
In early 1814, when it was finished, Paxmore said, “This one will sail in any breeze, but with a quartering wind she’ll clip along,” from which his men called her their clipper, and it was this name that Paxmore painted on her transom. But when Turlock saw it he said firmly, “I name my own ship,” and it was repainted the Ariel: “The spirit of the sea. This one lives close to the heart of oceans.”
He recruited a knowing crew of thirty-four and told them one cold January day, “We’ll try her on the Choptank,” but when he had her moving, he nosed her into the Chesapeake, then edged her down the eastern margin of the bay far from the dozing British ships of war, and when she reached Cape Henry he startled the men by sailing into the broad Atlantic, shouting, “Look at how she takes the waves!”
It was three months before he returned to the bay, bringing with him a crew hardened for war. He brought no booty; the Ariel had captured two small English merchantmen but had got little from them, just enough to feed the crew. At Patamoke he asked Paxmore to make a few alterations, picked up a commission from Paul Steed, and set forth again on his quest.
He was moving briskly down the bay when the lookout called, “Two British craft three points off starboard,” and when Matt took the glass his breath caught in his throat, for he saw that the lead ship was the Dartmoor, flagship of his mortal enemy, Captain Gatch. “He has eight guns to our two,” he cried to his men. “And maybe two or three more on the little ship trailing aft. But we can do it.”
Allowing his sailors no time to calculate what this enormous advantage might mean to Gatch, Matt gave one swift glance at his chart and satisfied himself that the battle could be confined to that broad stretch of bay between the York River on the west and Cape Charles on the east, and he was pleased that he would not have to worry about British support ships rushing in from the James River, for its mouth lay well to the south. Fate had given him room, a brisk wind off the western shore and a trusted crew. He asked no more.
Crisply he told his men, “We’ll cut that one out and sink her,” and he indicated the trailing sloop with the four guns. Having given this brief command, he swung the Ariel onto a starboard tack that would carry him between the two British vessels, and well aft of the more dangerous one in the lead. He calculated that he would dispose of the sloop before Captain Gatch in the Dartmoor could swing about and bring his guns to bear.
Now the Ariel leaped through the water, her low decks awash, her tall masts straining under the weight of sail, and so expertly did the clipper move that Turlock succeeded in the first part of his plan: his two guns punished the lesser vessel and stopped her in the water, whereupon he swung about and bore down upon her. Nine Choptank men swarmed aboard, scuffled, killed when necessary and set the ship ablaze.
There was no way to recover them without stopping dead in the water and allowing the Dartmoor to fire at will, so Turlock waved to his men and watched approvingly as they launched rowboats. They were out of the fight.
When Captain Gatch swung the Dartmoor about, intending to run down the impudent American ship, he saw with amazement that it was captained by a man he thought he had killed long since—“Good God! It’s Turlock!” Spotting immediately that Turlock had only two guns while the Dartmoor carried eight, he shouted, “That’s the new thing they call the clipper. We sink her now!”
Every advantage lay with Gatch. By swinging north he had acquired the weather gauge; he had eight well-trained gunners and an eager crew who believed in his invincibility. What was more important, at the bombardment of Patamoke he had outsmarted Turlock and felt confident he could do so again. He could not lose and told his men so.
Before Turlock could untangle himself from his engagement with the first British vessel Captain Gatch bore down on him from the north, sails tightly controlled and the four port guns exactly trained. The pass was a masterpiece of seamanship, and Gatch’s gunners, secure on their steady platform, devastated the Ariel’s decks; they did not, however, damage either mast, so that Turlock had an opportunity to head eastward and prepare himself for the next assault. With some dismay he noted that neither of his gunners had even fired at the British ship during the first sally. He did not propose to have this happen again; he would choose the time and condition of the next contact.
Accordingly, he danced about in the eastern portion of the bay, keeping careful eye on the Dartmoor but also watching with satisfaction as the British sloop burned to the waterline: You’ve lost half your command, Gatch. Now the other half.
As he waited for an opportunity that would permit him to keep the Dartmoor to port, he ordered his gunners to swing their swivels to that side and warned, “This time we must hurt them.” To his sailors he said, “We’ll give them full musket fire.”
Obedient to his plan, the Ariel moved with great speed on a starboard tack, almost throwing itself across the path of Gatch’s schooner, and as it passed, it delivered a withering fire from all kinds of weapons. One cannonball glanced off the foremast, causing some of the forward canvas to lose wind; muskets ripped across the deck. It had been a notable exchange and no American sailors had been lost.
At this point it would have been prudent for Turlock to retire; he had hurt his enemy, and there was no reasonable hope that in a prolonged battle his lightly armed clipper could continue to rake the heavier Dartmoor. But Turlock was not thinking prudently; he was so bent upon revenge that safe escape was no part of his plan. “Shall we finish them off?” he cried to his men, and they shouted their assent. So he altered course, moved down along the west coast of the bay and proposed to come at the Dartmoor on a rushing port tack, with a quartering wind.
But Gatch discerned the plan and conceded that for the moment, with his foremast scarred, he had the slower vessel, so he prepared to pass starboard-to-starboard and to rake the insolent American foe with a hail of fire not to be forgotten. Turlock’s men quickly understood the tactic and realized that all depended upon their successful passage of th
It was a test of captains, too. Gatch had the advantage of fire superiority; Turlock had the wind, the speed, the taste of partial victory. And each had the support of his crew, the English knowing that Clever Trevor was a lucky leader, the Americans relying as they had always done on the courage of Silverfist.
How beautiful the two Paxmore schooners were as they maneuvered through the Chesapeake, the old Dartmoor as fine as the bay had produced, the new Ariel a sprite foretelling a future when clippers of this design would command the seas from China to Murmansk. They sped across the bay like those bugs of summer which dance upon the water, their miraculous feet never breaking the surface. Their masts were raked, their lines severely clean; they leaped forward as if eager for a test of strength, and during one fearful moment Gatch thought: My God! Does he intend to ram? He judged the American capable of any folly.
But at the last moment Matt Turlock veered to bring his starboard across the path of the Dartmoor, and the firing began. The American gunners were good, and they were resolute, killing two English sailors; but the heavy guns of the Dartmoor were terrifying, and they ripped the Ariel.
Wood shattered. Men were thrown helter-skelter. The clipper seemed to shiver, and a yard came crashing down. This time the English fire had been irresistible, and the fragile Ariel was doomed.
That is, she would have been doomed if Turlock had been stupid enough to wait for a third test of arms. He was not. A quick survey satisfied him that she had been sorely damaged and that on any further runs her advantages of speed and maneuverability would be lost. Without hesitation he fled.
“Now we have her!” Gatch shouted as his men cheered. And he prepared to chase the wounded Ariel to her hiding place in the Choptank and destroy her as he had done her predecessor.
But it was not Captain Turlock’s intention to hide anywhere. Without reflecting on where or how he would refit, he limped toward the entrance to the bay, trusting as his father would have done forty years earlier that somewhere in that great ocean the Ariel would find refuge. Wounded, her spars in disarray, her decks cluttered with debris, the ship crept out into the open ocean, where not even a swift Dartmoor could catch her and where she could heal herself.
“She’ll sink out there,” Sir Trevor prophesied as he watched her go, but he did not believe his own prediction; he suspected that somehow Matt Turlock would mend that sleek clipper and that somewhere on the oceans of the world the two vessels would meet again. Nevertheless, when he reported the battle to the Admiralty he claimed a victory. “True, we lost one small sloop of no consequence, but the Ariel we punished, and this is important, for the Americans had begun to place great store in their new clipper. We drove her from the seas.” He now had two victories over Captain Turlock and no defeats, and when his men rejoined Admiral Cockburn’s fleet for the attack on Washington, they boasted, “Clever Trevor knows how to handle Americans. He smashes ’em.”
Of all the places in the Atlantic to which Matt Turlock might have gone to mend his ship, he chose the least likely. He sailed to St. Eustatius, that insignificant Dutch island in the north Caribbean. No longer was it an entrepôt of swarming wealth; one of the peace treaties that periodically swept Europe had returned the island to the Dutch and it was once more what it had been down the centuries: a sleepy, unimportant little harbor with two or three shops that did a pitiful business. Of course, along the shore there still stood those immense warehouses which for a few exciting years in the 1770s had housed the wealth of the world, but now they were empty and mice gnawed their timbers.
The few artisans on hand were glad to find work and in a desultory way repaired the Ariel, so that by the end of three weeks she was as stout as ever, but what to do with her became a problem. She could not sail back to the Chesapeake, for in mid-1814 that body of water became so infested with British battleships that no American craft could move, and that condition would prevail for more than a year. Other logical ports were blockaded, so the tedious business began of drifting back and forth across the ocean, hoping for profitable trade.
Captain Turlock made one successful run from the French island of Martinique to the Spanish port of Vera Cruz in Mexico, and there he loaded timber intended for Halifax, but a British gunboat had identified him as American and driven him from shore. He disposed of the untrimmed logs far across the sea in Portugal, but was able to find no cargo there destined for any port that he could enter. With a swift clipper and a crew of thirty-four to feed, he was being driven from the seas.
So one day as he was drifting aimlessly across the Atlantic he recalled his final trip in the Whisper: he had deposited a cargo of meat at Havana and was about to quit the port when a ship chandler rowed out to advise him that three slaves were waiting to be smuggled to Virginia, and that a substantial freight charge would be paid if he delivered them. He did so, and the money had added substantially to his profit, so now he began casually inquiring about the slave trade, and learned the basic principles: “Fill your ship with any kind of trading goods, run to Africa, pick the slaves out of the barracoons, ferry them to Brazil, take rum and sugar to any commercial port—and repeat the process.”
Blockaded by the British from honest trading, he was tempted by the easy money to be made in Africa but was restrained from sailing there by his awareness of the law. Since 1792 American ship captains had been forbidden to import slaves into the new nation and were indicted for piracy if they tried. In 1808 all importation, regardless of what nation owned the vessel, was outlawed, and Maryland, with her own surplus of slaves, even forbade their purchase from neighboring states like Virginia.
And yet the trade continued. Daring captains could snatch enormous profits by sneaking to Africa, unloading their cargoes in Cuba or Brazil, or even smuggling prime hands to secret landing spots in the swamps of Georgia. It was this nefarious trade that Matt Turlock decided to enter.
“Not permanently,” he assured his mate, Mr. Goodbarn, as they headed for Africa. “Just a trip now and then till peace returns.” And when they reached the Portuguese harbor of Luanda in Angola he explained to the local factors, “I’m not a slaver. Just this one trip to Brazil,” and a Senhor Gonçalves said, “Good! I have two hundred and sixteen awaiting passage.”
But when Gonçalves inspected the bare structure of the Ariel’s holds, he laughed. “If you propose to carry slaves, you’ve got to have proper pens.” He hired a team of Portuguese carpenters familiar with this procedure, and they swarmed into the bowels of the ship, installing massive barricades, and one afternoon, as the sound of hammers reverberated through the ship, Turlock had a premonition: They’re nailing down my destiny. He realized that once his ship was fitted for the slave trade, the impetus to continue would become irresistible: You don’t refurbish your entire hold for one trip. But regardless of the money involved, he swore: Once this war ends, out come those partitions. We go back to honest cargo.
When the job was done, Senhor Gonçalves invited him below to approve what the carpenters had achieved, and he was shaken by the gloomy massiveness of the bulwarks, the cramped space allotted to the slaves. Where the foremast came through the deck to seat itself in the keelson, a stout wall had been built. Where the mainmast came through, a vertical grating had been erected, and a short distance aft of that, another wall terminated the holding area. But what astonished Turlock was that between the bottom of the hold and the deck, a whole new floor had been laid, and the heights of the ceilings were unbelievable—“In the lower hold it’s got to be less than four feet.” (“Just under,” Gonçalves said.) “And here in the upper it can’t be more than four-eight.” (“Four-ten,” Gonçalves said proudly, showing Matt that a man could more or less stand erect if he kept his belly bent.)
“What you have,” he continued, “is four compartments. Two above, two below. Room for four hundred sixty slaves in al
Turlock felt strangled, as if he had constructed a jail for himself; he was aghast at what these carpenters had done to his ship. He wanted to quit the slave trade right there, but Senhor Gonçalves said reassuringly, “Captain, they had to make two layers so you could load more slaves. That’s Where the profit is. And they had to make them solid. You must remember that for a hundred and fifteen days strong black men will stand cursing behind those bars, trying every trick to break them down and mutiny your ship. In this trade we’ve learned one thing. If they do break loose—and sooner or later they’ll break even these bars—the only thing to do is shoot them ... fast.”
When the slaves were herded onto his ship, and thrown below into the four compartments, Turlock suffered additional revulsion, thinking that no proud waterman from the Choptank would accept such indignity; within the first minutes there would be riot. But these aren’t watermen, he rationalized, and when the hatches were battened down and the holds sealed except for small openings into which food and water would be delivered, he raised anchor and set sail for the Brazilian port of Belém, some distance east of the Amazon. When he landed there in January 1815 the Portuguese plantation owners were delighted to get the slaves and assured him that his profits would be prodigious, but as often happened in such cases, payment was delayed, and he was forced to lay over.
The more he saw of this steaming tropical town and its relationship to the Amazon, the more he liked it. He began to frequent a tavern called Infierno—its door was guarded by two devils carved in ebony, and they seemed to wink at him when he entered, as if they were a foretaste of what slavers could expect in afterlife—and there he heard fantastic stories about the Amazon: “Thirty percent of all the water that enters the oceans of the world comes from here. Sixty miles out at sea the water is still fresh. Throw down your buckets and drink. No man has ever gone to the end of the river. It has birds and animals that would stupefy you.”